I should be doing some work around here. I took a benedryl this morning and immediately regretted it. Now I'm struggling to stay awake.
About atheism and religion . . .
Raised as a Catholic, I received all the training and everything, 12 years of Catholic school. My father saw it as his sworn duty to make sure I was educated in the Church. And . . . you can't be properly educated about the church in only a year or two, no you need twelve at least. That way they could thoroughly mislead you, and use you as a cash cow doing it.
Religion is lucrative for a selected number of clergy or leaders. The rest at least receive a vocation and job security supplied by the believers. This is true not just of Catholics, of course, but for every other cult, before or after being exalted to the "religion" status. There are sincere believers, there are sincere believers who still deceive, and there are the connivers at the top. The connivers at the top are really the whole reason belief-based religions keep going.
In the US, religion is the practically the only completely tax-free industry. The result has been an explosion of churches and sects.
Okay, enough of the random rant. You should get the idea.
How did I lose my faith? Or get rid of it? First, I never really fit in to begin with. In grade school, when all the other guys clamored to sign up as an altar boys, I didn't. That set me apart right there. I did participate in the choir-- and loved it. I loved the singing, even if the worship was baffling. My entire reason for not volunteering was they demanded you serve six o'clock mass, and even then I had such great difficulty just getting up for school, that I just didn't think I would be good doing anything at six. They thought I was being a heathen, but I was just being lazy.
I became a real heathen much later, but the religion was baffling to me long before then. I had years of wavering between religion and atheism, but I could never get past the truly baffling problems of the whole concept of God.
First, the Bible tells of a completely different universe. One where the earth was flat, at the center of the universe and immobile. In fact, the universe was "the world." That universe did not have any natural laws, because it was all run directly by God's power. In that world, He could stop the believably stop the sun, not only because IT was moving rather than the earth spinning, but because he did not set it up to move by automatic laws to begin with, and he would not have to contend with laws of momentum, inertia and centrifugal force.
But once I began to find out that the universe had laws, and in fact, the Biblical universe was only superficially like the real one, despite there being a purportedly all-knowing God to inform people, that created a crisis with me.
As science began to uncover laws of the universe that were very mathematical, the concept of the Deist God emerged. As the old expression goes, if you find a watch, there must be a watchmaker. Certainly, Isaac Newton believed this by what he found.
True, if what you're finding is, in fact, a watch and not superficially like a watch only due to the mental constructs you use to partially understand it. That's just a quibble though, compared to this question: why would God need a watch?
A watch is a device, a machine. Human beings set up machines specifically because we aren't all powerful, all knowing, ever present and immortal. We invent watches because otherwise, we can't keep track of time. We invented cars because we're limited by location, and we're not that fast. We invented computers because we're not that smart. We invented telescopes, because we're not all-seeing.
Now, if God is all of those, why would he have to create autonomic laws of nature? If God is capable of having the earth orbit the sun by doing it himself with his all-mighty powers, why create a law that can be detected, why not use his HAND, and let that be detected? Moreover, and this is even a stickier theological problem, if God creates a law, can he even break it? If He, then how can his word be truth?
You might get around this by saying that, of course he can break the law, but think of the implications there. It means that every law God gives is simply by His caprice and that natural law, referred to universally or in morality, simply does not exist. The Ten Commandments? All for show.
Deism was a way of saving belief in light of what science was finding by the 17th century, or rather, wasn't finding: any evidence of God. Instead, we found autonomic laws/behaviors. It created a God the Father concept far different than the petty, nasty tempered character of Yahweh in the Bible. So, it actually allowed at the time a hybrid believer/atheist, who could let God be as distant and unanswered as needed, without sparking any other nasty conflicts between believers, like the thirty-year war. It let God be both mysterious, and a matter of personal judgment.
Deism goes to show how believers adapt to allow some semblance of belief. A believer does not have to disprove atheism or even have any "evidence" of God. For some reason, be it fear of damnation, or a need for optimism, etc. a different psychological need in any believer, they want or need to believe. All they have to do is give themselves enough doubt in science or rational thought, or even motives, to assert their faith and feel honest about it, and they'll do it. Fortunately for them, but not so much for the rest of us, the Bible gives them enough canards and catch-phrases to do this. Once you become convinced that your and humankind's eternal destiny are absolutely dependent on a belief, then nothing becomes too ridiculous to uphold, preserve and spread it.
Unfortunately, one of the best ways to do this is with ignorance. Shut out or renounce any ideas or facts that may interfere with your belief and so endanger your soul. However, the damage isn't confined to individuals. Since the God in the Bible punishes whole nations, certain things like abortion, which should be a personal matter become major public issues. If a woman seeking an abortion individually, it's a matter of her sin, but the country making it legal is a matter of the nation sinning.
Therefore, believers make it everybody's business.
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